The Boy and the Heron” is, apparently, the last film, the real last film of Hayao Miyazaki, the Japanese animated film director responsible for the existence of Studio Ghibli, the now hyper-recognized and massive studio responsible for films like “The Spirited Away”, “My Neighbor Totoro”, “Ponyo and the Secret of the Little Mermaid” and many, many, other films today considered classics (and even adapted into plays). The arrival of “The Boy and the Heron” was, in fact, proof of Ghibli’s capacity for success today, the moment where it has undoubtedly surpassed the local, massive, giant success in Japan and demonstrates that it is an event with arrival in all corners of the planet: the film was released without an advertising campaign, without prior announcements, out of nowhere. Far from the marketing gestures that are now unbearable, and smoke-mongers, enthroning rather vague, clumsy cultural forms, in the first person, Ghibli decided only that the film exists, and from there it surprises.
Retirement. Loved by the great film tellers, such as Steven Spielberg and James Cameron, Miyazaki had announced his retirement for 2013, with “The Wind Blows.” But now, everything indicates that it is the end. Miyazaki has been called, and not without reason, the world‘s greatest living animator. “The Boy and the Heron” is the director’s twelfth film, and the eternal one compared to Walt Disney, who is so fashionable now that his mouse can be used by anyone, is even greater, at the risk of falling into a comparison clumsy: his way of narrating has become a focus of resistance seen by millions. For example, while the Disney company, one of the giants of animation, appeals to sequels, to abandon 2D, to more clumsy ways of trying to shake up the market, Ghibli continues to believe in the classic 2D, in telling without franchises, in power of each story and its ability to become an unforgettable experience. Not only that, like few others, Miyazaki and his collaborators have focused on talking about the clumsiness of brainless technological progress, the destruction of the environment through mere ambition, the way in which work dehumanizes and believes like few others in adventure and in the beauty of the image, in the possibilities of animation, to generate what cinema misses: the impact from its essence, and not from a marketing operation, or an update in politically correct ideological terms. But today that seems, at least at the time of the news, to have come to an end: Studio Ghibli is slowed down, without projects, with licensed animators or in other projects.
THE PROCESS. Legend has it that when Miyazaki starts a project, he does it not with a script idea. Far from formulas and rather faithful to his ways, he makes them with drawings, with storyboards. This is how he communicated when he was younger, since it was very difficult for him, due to shyness, to talk to others. Thus “The Boy and the Heron” was born. Basically, he begins to draw, generate characters, sequences and there he organically finds the story. Very far from the natural, and horribly natural, functioning of design groups today, of figuring out how to talk about this or that topic. He already said it in the documentary “The Kingdom of Dream and Madness”, where he speaks in first person about his process: “It may sound ridiculous, but it has happened to me many times that the team on the film tells me that they don’t have the slightest idea of what is happening. When we were doing “Spirited Away” I didn’t really know what was happening. I think we may never understand those worlds. What can you really know about that kind of world we created?” Something similar happened with “The Boy and the Heron”: not even his animation supervisor, Takeshi Honda, knew what was happening, how it would end, or even missing fragments of information. But he did know that although Miyazaki did not do the complete storyboards, it was an original vision of the author, perhaps the last at the time of cinema. Honda explains that many times the author illustrates segments, and the team begins to work from there. But in this case, when Miyazaki first opened the world of the film to his team, he already had more than two hundred illustrations, from different moments of it. And in several interviews, Honda has added a component: “You could perceive that it was a very personal film, in the sense that there was a lot of autobiography in it.”
FROM INSIDE. The film being released in the country by Cinetopia, which had already successfully re-released several of the Japanese company’s classics, opens with a war scene, which marks a milestone in the hour of darkness in its entire filmography. That scene is one of the elements that say that Miyazaki, born in 1941, talks about himself. Once, one could read in the Starting Point interview compilation, talking about those memories: “My first memories were of bombed cities.” It is not a film marked by those personal experiences either, but it is one that shows key moments in his life, which he had never animated. The film does not hide its links with the author’s life, with events that he has already recounted in interviews and books. But that exists in much of his work: the sick mother in “My Neighbor Totoro,” the airplane engineer father in “The Wind Blows.” It is the same author who has said, a little exaggerated, but faithful to his way of creating, that “Filming only brings suffering.” So, the fact of marking the way in which Miyazaki shows fragments of his experience is perhaps a deception, but perhaps not, especially when it comes to a film that does beat as if it were the last. And Miyazaki himself has said that perhaps there is more of him in the film, or at least that is what the collaborators have said, who feel, like Honda, that more than ever, the author’s own life has filtered into his stories. Toshio Suzuki, one of the founders of Ghibli, says that Miyazaki was very clear about this, telling The Guardian: “At the beginning of the project, Miyazaki came to me and asked me: This is going to be my story, is it okay for me to do that?” Suzuki nodded yes.
In fact, Masaki Suda, who plays the famous bird in the film, tells an anecdote that reflects the author: the voice actor says that Miyazaki told him sincerely: “I apologize for giving you such a strange role.”
THE END. Miyazaki has not given any interviews at the time of the film. The film has just won a Golden Globe and everything indicates that it will be the greeting that the Oscars will give to the author. Apparently this is the end of Ghibli, at least as a studio, as a story factory. It’s time to greet the teacher in the halls, where the stories of his life are everything he dreamed them to be.